The present invention relates to feeding apparatus and, more particularly, to an apparatus for feeding overlapping documents.
In recent years, there has been a trend to automate banking functions as they relate to bank customers. The Automated Teller Machines (ATM's) have been developed to provide remote banking operations without the presence of a bank teller. These machines include apparatuses for feeding legal documents from a storage area past a print station where data is printed thereon and then through a discharge outlet in the machine. One of the problems that has been encountered when feeding documents in such an arrangement is the presence of overlapping documents which are transmitted as a single document herein characterized as an overlapped document. Prior ATM's provided overlapped document detectors for detecting the presence of such overlapped documents. In one instance, the detection of the overlapped documents required the removal of such documents from the feeding station by hand. In another instance, in order to accommodate the automatic removal of overlapped documents, the guide chute through which the documents are fed has been lengthened to accommodate the oversize length of such documents. This requirement has limited the size of the ATM's that can be constructed, thereby affecting their marketing appeal. It is therefore a principal object of this invention to provide an apparatus for feeding and removing overlapping documents automatically from a document feed mechanism. It is another object of this invention to provide a compact apparatus for the feeding and removal of such overlapped documents. It is a further object of this invention to provide such an apparatus which is relatively simple in its construction and therefore low in cost.